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In the last 8 month I was working on a new version of my SVG (Raphaël) example application. Of course I have a job (freelancer) and I have children. So the time to spend was diminished on only a few hours per week mostly on my way to work.
Some of the results were presented at the Swedish Oracle meetup in Summer '16. But the final application was made for DOAG 2016.

What leads me to an important point. To have the honor to present somewhere means for me also a passion to learn something new, create something new and share it with others to become a better developer. You may think 8 month of free time spend for a simple presentation is stupid but now I'm able to propose new business solutions to my customers which I didn't even thought were so easy to achieve.

And this is not all. One month before DOAG I was talking to a colleague "Sebastian Reinig" from another consulting company (Syntegris). A young men still studying for master grade and with a lot of passion towards Oracle APEX. He explained me that he worked on an APEX project using my former SVG solution from back in '14 and he enhanced my code by adding cool new features. (e.g. drag and drop in the harbor).
I mean those features were fitting perfectly in my example application. So I asked him to join my presentation at DOAG and show others what he was doing. An he did it. He added a new variant of my old example and helped me finishing the application.

That is why we should be presenting somewhere:
To become better by doing something new.
To become better by sharing your ideas with others and even get inspired by their ideas.

Most of you probably know the "Quick Outline" function you have inside the SQL Developer.
It helps you to easily jump between different functions/procedures inside a package.

My colleague Holger told me about a bug in SQL Developer 3.x where you could use the "Outline" view with normal SQL files, too. Unfortunately in version 4 it didn't work anymore. So he stayed with version 3 for a long while. Otherwise he would had to scroll again instead of a short jump towards a specific SQL select.

A few days ago he asked me again if I knew a way how to easily jump between SQL statements inside a SQL file.
So I thought I talk to a SQL developer specialist "Sabine Heimsath". She knows all about those little tricks I have no clue about. But Sabine didn't know how to do it either.

My last chance was to ask on Twitter about a proper solution.

Do you know about a functionality similar to "Quick Outline" just for a file with SQL statements to jump in between them? @OracleSQLDev

Some of you may know of my personal interest for SVG interaction in APEX applications. I have been working with a JavaScript library called "Raphaël" (RaphaelJS, raphael.js or just raphael) for a while now. It is an amazing plugin to create all kind of customized business solutions. But before I show you how I have used Raphaël I tell you how I came to the technology and what happened in the last few years.

Inspired by his example I started looking for this library called Raphaël.What does the library do?
It creates dynamic SVG graphics with Javascript and JSON.

Why is it so special?
From an APEX developer point of view it gives you great possibilities to create SVG graphics right from the data out of your database and Raphaël itself brings you several ways to create more or less complex solutions. Just go on reading and you will find out.How to integrate Raphaël?
Upload the JavaScript file and include it in your APEX page.

Who made this library?
The developer behind Raphaël is Dmitry Baranovskiy. Compared to the APEX community he is the Patrick Wolf for SVG solutions using JavaScript. At least in my mind. :)
After the success of Raphaël he joined Adobe. There he created an library called Snap which is quite similar to Raphael and real powerful. Unfortunately it seems that the Snap library is not further developed anymore. The last release is from 2 years ago.

Why not creating the same kind of solution as Matt did?
It took me a while before I had the time thinking about the possibilities and purpose in business applications. I mean not every developer can create an example as Matt did. So I had some reasons to consider about:

1. No sources available
The typical company does not have SVG graphics to visualize their custom business situations. Mostly they use some advanced Excel files including some graphical parts to visualize their business cases. So if you create an APEX application based on those Excel solutions, the customers want their "beautiful" visualization in the APEX application as well.
For example an "workshop plan".

2. Complexity
It is really complicated to create a SVG graphic for the typical APEX developer.
Interacting with SVG graphics is also not the typical activity for an APEX developer.
Moving an SVG to the database to build it with Raphael is not easy either.
You may have to use Raphaël with other JavaScript libraries to enhance the user experience.

3. Time and Money
The more complex the example the more times it takes creating a result and it will become more expensive in the first run and on future updates.

4. Maintenance
Could a decent APEX developer take my solution and extend it? This is an important question to me.

What did I do?
2 Years ago I created an example application for the DOAG 2014.
There I published several examples how you can use Raphaël on top of an existing image file. I only created a few moving SVG components to interact with the application user.

Advantages:
- It is really easy to integrate.
- You do not need an SVG out of your Excel file to publish it in APEX.
- Less code because of the static background image

Disadvantage
- The image can't be responsive
- It can never be as beautiful as the example from MattThe solutions looked like this:

From my point of view:
You get a new way publishing data in a decent amount of time and low complexity in the source code.

This was two years ago.

On this years DOAG 2016 I will tell you how you can achieve even more powerful examples.
Using the Raphael extension Mapael for custom map visualizations or how to create an own SVG and convert it real fast towards APEX. And maybe there will come some more...

See you at DOAG.

And for all who will miss the DOAG event. I plan to publish an open source version of the application. So check apex.world at the end of the year. Maybe 24. of December will be a good date. :)

In my summer holiday, this year in Stockholm (Sweden), I will make a stop and present two APEX topics in the "Stockholm Oracle Meetup group".

The topics will be:

Working with interactive SVG graphics in APEX
Adding SVG graphics inside individual business applications is
quite in common. Because those graphics can increase the usability and
even more important it creates a completely new way to visualize data
inside a browser app. In this presentation he will show us how one can
integrate SVG charts and how to use the possibilities of SVG elements to
make every static image interactive with only a few lines of code.

APEX Dashboard Competition
At the beginning of the year the German community announced the
"APEX Dashboard Competition". The goal was to create a nice looking
dashboard application. This presentation will give you an impression
about the best 10 applications and their individual solutions.

If you are interested to see what APEX is capable of then join the presentation on meetup.com.

Thanks to Mathias Magnusson for organizing this great event. Hope to meet as much APEX enthusiasts as possible. :)

Since APEX 5 it is much easier to create master-detail pages with modal dialogs. But there is still no declarative way to create a conditional row based column link.

This blog post will show you a way how to create a conditional row based master - detail page.

1. We need some sample data:

WITH MY_DATA AS
(
select 1 as ID, 'APEX Connect' as name, 1 as CONDITIONAL_COL from DUAL
union all
select 2 as ID, 'KScope' as name, 0 as CONDITIONAL_COL from DUAL
union all
select 3 as ID, 'DOAG' as name, 1 as CONDITIONAL_COL from DUAL
union all
select 4 as ID, 'APEX-FRA Meetup Group' as name, 1 as CONDITIONAL_COL from DUAL
union all
select 5 as ID, 'Oracle World' as name, 0 as CONDITIONAL_COL from DUAL
)
select
ID,
NAME,
case when nvl(CONDITIONAL_COL,99) = 1 then
'inline-block'
else 'none' end as CSS,
case when nvl(CONDITIONAL_COL,99) = 1 then
'Visited conference'
else 'Not visited yet' end as DETAIL_COL
from MY_DATA

As you can see the column CONDITIONAL_COL defines the conditional appearance.
CONDITIONAL_COL = 1 means show a detail button.
CONDITIONAL_COL = 0 means no detail button.

2. Now we can create a APEX master detail page where the "Page Mode" of the detail page is set to:
"Modal Dialog".

The master page gets an Interactive Report with the above select statement.

3. Now we need to configure the column attributes inside the Interactive Report:

And the functionality to display the detail button conditionally is set by the column "CSS".

The result looks like this:

You can even filter the button by some readable data:

Security issue:
On the detail page you need a validation to check if the user is allowed to edit the data of the transmitted ID. An alternative way is to update the select so that no ID value will be generated if the user has no rights.
Example:

WITH MY_DATA AS
select
case when nvl(CONDITIONAL_COL,99) = 1 then
ID
else NULL end as ID,
ID as ID_DISPLAY
NAME,
case when nvl(CONDITIONAL_COL,99) = 1 then
'inline-block'
else 'none' end as CSS,
case when nvl(CONDITIONAL_COL,99) = 1 then
'Visited conference'
else 'Not visited yet' end as DETAIL_COL
from MY_DATA